“War can kill victims but it cannot kill memory of survivors.”
Hak Kim: “Alive”

Alive 18
Photo: Hak Kim

Guernica Child
The worms of death
pickled with incongruous silence
founded a nation of drones
dropping their bombs
in the middle of cities

The children who sing
with the language of concrete
bodies draped across enemies

Withered stalks of skin
adhere to lost continents,
limbs cry out for lonely trains
on platforms
where we used to live
singing love songs
of inscrutable hindsight

The sound of grandma
in her 1 bedroom apartment
on Kossuth Avenue,
three windows looking down
on pavements of children
limping across apocalyptic memory

A hospital memory before time,
its thumping heart sounds,
its broken windows,
its eyes of dogs shining
with incandescent radiation

An extremity of thought
along a hallway corridor
in a hospital wing
with glazed windows
filtering the late morning light
as it yellows across the plastic floor

Prior to the loss of time,
prior to the frozen-faced
armor that cloaks memory,
prior to sensation as hopeless rage

Beneath a frozen shell called “armor”
devising its own inhibitions,
dictating strategies for evading reality,
is the birth

Guernica- Pablo Picasso